Social Media is becoming increasingly popular in the marketing world, and a highly effective tool in promoting brands for much less money than through traditional channels.

Two examples to illustrate this recently have been The Fairtrade reporting a 12% increase in Fairtrade goods following their online marketing campaigns through customer focus and understanding, and viral videos becoming widespread amongst music music labels.

It's clear that when we go back to basics, it's the very simple marketing techniques that work. In the world of social media marketing, the key being, to create conversation, follow the conversation, and join the conversation. We're all aware that understanding our customers is essential in the marketing process, and how better than to address your target base first hand? Engage your audience, find out what makes them tick, and more importantly, find out what doesn't.

The more time you dedicate to building a strong network of contacts, followers and industry experts, the quicker you build credibility, recognition and ultimately, convert those strangers into twenty minute meetings.

As if networking wasn’t fun enough, Bump, the app that makes it even easier to exchange information with other users by bumping phones, has just been released for the iPhone.

The app allows iPhone users to compare calendars, instantly connect on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and send messages back and forth. This is a great app for professionals that travel in groups of other smartphone users as it makes it simple to transfer information without the need to pass out business cards.

It’s easy to use; just open up the app and make the “bump” gesture with the device to share your contact information.You can set up your contact profile by selecting your existing address book entry or by creating something brand new. You can then customise which information you want to include or exclude. The ability to compare calendars and set up meetings on the move is a great addition and could be ideal for business networking events.Sharing your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn information instantly, Bump can even compare contacts you have with the user you are “bumping” and show you further details – another great way to network on the move.

Coca Cola saw phenomenal results this week when they joined an online discussion using Twitter’s “promoted tweets”.

Where the usual number of visitors to click on a regular ad is around 0.02%, Coke saw impressive stats with an engagement rate of 6%.

Twitter first introduced the new advertising system in April, allowing companies such as Starbucks and Sony Pictures to pay to display their postings on pages of search results for popular topics. Disney Pixar became the first company to buy an ad within its “trending topic” section just last week.

Unlike search results, this form of sponsorship appears on the main page Twitter users see when they are logged into the service, at the bottom of the user-generated list of the 10 most popular talking points on the site.

Coke tweeted messages congratulating the England and US teams, linked to videos on YouTube and invited people to celebrate their teams’ success.

Naturally, many advertisers are now excited about the potential of social networks to promote word-of-mouth recommendations of their products.Using social networks as a business tool allows great opportunities to establish relationships with consumers that can’t be achieved through TV and press.

Twitter is quickly becoming a trend amongst individuals, businesses and brands worldwide. However although millions are signing up to the social networking phenomenon, a disappointing trend is the retention rate of users.   Many people sign up, test the waters for a few days, and quickly find it to be of no use or value, and promptly abandon their accounts.  As we always say, it's not the tools, it's how you use them. To remedy this, I've outlined the common mistakes of new users and some ways to help stop you becoming one of the Twitter quitter statistics...

Don't just follow celebrities and brands

This is one way traffic. Celebrity tweets are simply there to push messages your way - unless you're extremely lucky, they won't respond directly to you.  Follow relevant discussion groups and get involved. Comment on other people's tweets in order to increase your own visibility.

Have something interesting to say

Be creative. Not everyone is interested to know what people are having for dinner. The most interesting people are those who aren't openly trying to sell their products or striving for web fame. Talk about relevant subjects and consider what you want to get out of it. If you talk to interesting, relevant people, you will immediately add value to your business through building a strong network of quality contacts who will give credence to your knowledge.

Get Mobile 

Having Twitter on your mobile allows you to remain up to date and tweet more frequently.  Tweeting once or twice a day won't give you much value.  In order to build up a strong following and increase your credibility, you need to be dedicated to your tweets.

To get you started, check out Twitter Mobile for the iPhone... http://www.twittermobile.co.uk/nbsp;

Twitter isn't for everyone, but if you fancy giving it a try, do so with a little bit of knowledge - you never know, you may just get something out of it other than knowing everyone else's plans for the evening... 

The big news this morning is Britain’s new Prime Minister, David Cameron and his coalition government. But unlike your tabloids tales, we’re going to take a different angle on the story…

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have determined that, in some instances, combing Twitter for data can be as good a way of researching opinions as conducting an actual poll. The next time there's a big election or important issue up for debate, think about thanking Twitter's founders if your phone doesn't ring.  

A small team examined consumer confidence and political opinions that were measured in 2008 and 2009, putting information from the Consumer Board, Gallup, Reuters, the University of Michigan, and Twitter side by side.

They found that the Twitter data gave consumer confidence and presidential job approval polls.  While the results do not come without apprehension, it is encouraging that expensive and time-intensive polling can be replaced with the simple-to-gather text data that is generated from online social networking.

More research on the subject will probably take place now and if the results stay the same, Twitter is sure to receive a lot of exposure.  Given how easy analysing Twitter data could be, the site may get name-checked on news programs and financial channels left and right.

This development is sort of a win for Twitter even if the researcher's initial conclusion is disproved, too, considering that not long ago, it would have been impossible to imagine Carnegie Mellon taking an interest in the site.

One of the biggest additions will be the ability for businesses to accept Twitter direct messages, even from people they don’t follow. Here is just some of the features that you can expect to enjoy in the near future...

Starting Up with Twitter Business Centre - A small group of business users are getting emails from the Twitter team, inviting them to test “the Twitter Toolkit.” Once you click the link, you’ll then have to activate the business features for your accounts. You’ll then be taken to a page to fill in information such as business contact info and whether you are a small business, large company, or an individual/group.

Digging into the Features - Once you’ve activated your account, it will be automatically verified. This is important because Twitter Verified Accounts have been limited before now. It’s good to see that Twitter has finally decided to expand the Verified Accounts program to brands and organisations.

After activation, four tabs will appear: Overview, Business Info, Verification, and Contributors. Overview provides basic information about business accounts, Business Info allows you to change the information submitted during initial registration and the Contributors tab gives you the ability to add multiple users to your business account so that they can tweet on its behalf.

Twitter’s new feature will give you the ability to accept direct messages from any of your followers, regardless of whether they follow you or not. This is huge for businesses that perform customer service via Twitter: they can get feedback and deal with private customer issues without having to follow the person back first.

There are no details yet as to how much Twitter will charge businesses for these features. For now though, the company is refining and testing its Twitter Toolkit before its eventual public debut.

It looks as though search is about to enter a new era as it begins to mix into social media. Search engines have already attempted to place some kind of ranking on social updates and we already know that search engines take things like follower quality into account in how they rank tweets.

Now there is a lot of talk of Facebook "likes" and Twitter retweets taking the place of links. Not that they’re dying out – there's plenty of room for link sharing on either of these services, but in some ways these kinds of sharing are replacing links in many cases.

With Facebook's Open Graph and social plugins devouring the web, suddenly liking is taking the place of linking in some provisional scenarios.

While I don’t think anyone specifically saw the Open Graph stuff coming too long before it was announced, it's still reflective of what we've known for some time. The way people are obtaining information online is diversifying. Google's real competition isn't coming from other search engines. It's coming from different avenues of information access.

The biggest threat to Google the search engine (as opposed to the company, which offers a lot more) is people not having to rely on the traditional search engine. While I don't think Google has anything to truly worry about in terms of losing users, it has to worry more about users just not using it as often. Instead they're getting their information from apps, from friends via social networks and even when they're not necessarily at Facebook but on a site or app, via things like social plug-ins.

Here are 5 reasons Google and Search might not dominate the next decade:

    1. The search process is inefficient
    2. Mobile GPS Eliminates the need for location-based search
    3. Social Matching Could Create Valuable Connections
    4. Content Recommendations to Replace Search
    5. Suggestions Will Be the Core of Our Shopping Experience

On a not so negative note, Facebook likes may not translate to better Google rankings, but so what? It's not about choosing between likes and links. Both are ideal.

The point of all of this is it's not just about getting links anymore. Links will always be of use, but social interactions may equal them in importance, and in some cases may be of greater use to your visibility, and ultimately getting people to your site, your content, your store, or your shopping cart.

Facebook and Twitter get a lot of the credit for all of the conversation that’s going on around the web these days, and quite rightly so - they certainly account for a great deal of it! However there’s still public conversation happening in many other channels - blogs, Q&A sites, news sites, YouTube, other social networks, and forums.

Google's newly redesigned SERPs place a great deal of emphasis on conversations, as I mentioned in my previous blog post. The new ‘Discussions’ option lets users refine their search results by time, relevance or date and they’re given the option for all discussions, forums or Q&As.

They can refine this even further by filtering for discussions of any length, short, medium, or long. In addition, they can sort by standard results, sites with images, and page previews, and by all results and results from nearby locations. That's some pretty deep down drilling!

Anyway, no matter which parameters you choose to search by under discussions, the non-everything options are Forums and Q&A.

Businesses looking to increase their exposure and visibility ought to consider answering questions from consumers in areas that they are qualified. This has always been something to consider for a successful online marketing strategy, but now forums and Q&A sites not only attract targeted traffic, but appear in search results. Not to mention they help you sell your expertise in your line of work. The difference now is increased visibility. Google's search options may not be new, but they're more visible now, and you can pretty much count on them getting used a lot more.

Q&A sites are also not new, but lately it seems that we're seeing an increased focus on them from a variety of players. Yahoo, the top Q&A site recently served its billionth answer, but others are bringing different elements to the Q&A table. Some are integrating local business listings with them to provide. Others are finding their own unique spin. Google itself even purchased Q&A property Aardvark recently. It will be interesting to see if this becomes more heavily integrated with the Discussions option.

One of the reasons YouTube became so popular is because there are YouTube videos embedded all over the web. There is a good chance you will see a YouTube video without actually visiting YouTube. It's a one reason YouTube videos go viral. Now it looks like Twitter is getting ready to launch embeddable tweets.

YouTube has embeddable videos to thank for a good deal of its visibility and ultimately its usage. If you think Twitter is big now, wait until Tweets are embedded everywhere. If tweets are easily embeddable, you can pretty much guarantee that you're going to see a lot more tweets visually appearing in content all over the web. Like it did for YouTube, this may bring a great deal more visibility and usage to Twitter.

Promoted Tweets

Embeddable Tweets will likely fuel engagement with Promoted Tweets. If Twitter includes engagement buttons for replying, retweeting, and favourite-ing, it's going to inspire more engagement from readers, and with the tweets appearing on various blogs and news sites, it's going to open up the audience for that particular tweet.

Increased Followers

Embedded tweets will potentially lead to you getting more followers. Let's say I've never heard of you, but you tweet about the kind of stuff I'm interested in. If I see your tweet, which I find valuable, I’ve discovered a new person to follow on Twitter. Just like that, you've gained a new follower. Assuming that blog has more readers interested in that topic, you may gain a significant amount of new followers, all from that single tweet that was embedded in that single blog post.

Reason to Tweet More

The more you tweet, the more content there is that may be embedded by someone. That said, this isn't reason to tweet insignificant thoughts. The content is king rule still applies. Tweet things of value and you will be more likely to attract embeds.